2006/09/18

How to download more than 2 files simultaneously using Internet Explorer

As stated in 8.1.4 Practical Considerations from RFC2616:
Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy. A proxy SHOULD use up to 2*N connections to another server or proxy, where N is the number of simultaneously active users. These guidelines are intended to improve HTTP response times and avoid congestion.
IE follows that suggestion, and it will not open more than two connections to the same server, preventing you from downloading more than 2 files simultaneusly (again from the same server). There is, however, a way to override this behaviour (after all, this is just a suggestion). It's a classic, but it always takes me some time to find it whenever I need to do this registry hack. Here it is:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
"MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server"=Dword:00000008
"MaxConnectionsPerServer"=Dword:00000008
Taking into account that RFC2616 is dated June 1999, and client's bandwidth (and also server's) has grown a lot since then, I think that it should not be a problem increasing that limit from 2 to 6 or 8 files at a time.

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